Caity Kerr – Page 4 – Caity's Blog

Animation for the Creative Industries – Revision of textures.

Posted on April 12, 2023April 14, 2023 by Caity Kerr

Ryan had suggested that we should have more texture sheets, and this would allow us to have only one human model and we could apply the textures on to that, randomising which texture applied to the human’s skin.

As this was an opportunity to achieve higher resolution on the human model, I played around with the textures and the UV’s:

The cheeks and eyes were completely off, and the eyes felt a little small on my initial pass.

This was getting a little closer, but the cheek blush felt very in your face, I tried lowering its opacity:

The cheek blush felt a bit too big, so I scaled it down:

In the end, I just felt that the texture blush was a bit too silly looking on the face. It worked well for fingers and elbows, but as the face was going to be extremely noticable, I moved back to a subtle blush:

Ryan was able to get all of these elements pulled into UE:

Lip Sync Animation – Additional Character Designs.

Posted on April 10, 2023April 14, 2023 by Caity Kerr

I spent some of the day designing the additional characters for my lip sync animation cycle, first I went on the hunt for some reference:

I didn’t want to labor over designing these characters for too long, as they’re only in use to establish scale and a little bit of narrative for my main character gigabyte:

I’m really happy with the way these characters turned out, and I think that their little composition is cute. I plan on having Facs be emitting light, like a photocopier, her eyes flickering over to the camera; I want Keyz typing on his keyboard and characters appearing on his monitor display; I will have Tef turn around to look at the camera whilst on the phone defensively, and Buzz will simply be floating up and down and will also turn around to face the camera.

I am feeling incredibly overwhelmed and burnt out, I would love to make some real headway with this animation this week and be asking for feedback moving towards the weekend.

Lip Sync Project – Progress!

Posted on April 9, 2023April 14, 2023 by Caity Kerr

Due to a dip in productivity, I wanted to bring my audio into rough animator on ipad so that I would be able to go to my local library and work, to get out of the house for a while. I followed this tutorial to get that working:

I also changed up the audio a bit, as per Alec’s feedback. He told me that the animation was a little long, and it might help to lighten the load by taking the bulk of Ali’s dialogue out, and just have her come in at the end to take Giga-Byte’s battery out and interact with him for a very short time. I also added a little break in between “What is wrong with you people?” and “We are office drones” so that the scene can cut to some office-robots performing administration tasks. Alec had mentioned that it was quite difficult to contextualise the surroundings and situation that my two characters were in, which made the animation hard to follow. I think by adding some administrative robots to cut to, will add a little bit of humour but also allow me to establish the scale of gigabyte and make it a little easier to introduce ali to the scene:

I also spent the evening making a rough story board for the animtion, to get my mind around the camera, movements etc:

I am planning to spend tomorrow working on the administration robot designs, and nailing their composition for their short few seconds on screen. I want to make sure that they’re well designed, and as they will have very minimal movement I believe that I am OK to use this time to focus on their design and layout.

Animation for the Creative Industries – Cleaning up Files and Materials for Scripters and Layout Designers to use for demonstration.

Posted on March 26, 2023April 14, 2023 by Caity Kerr

I originally began with the eyes drawn directly onto the textures used for the face, but this wasn’t working well as the resolution was noticeably bad. I put the eyes in their own space:

This looked much better on the character models:

I made sure that all of the facial features and hair fit to the model, and worked with the facial feature textures on the main body of the character model. I then sent these to the scripters:

Animation for the Creative Industries – Additional Prop Modelling and NPC Texture Progress

Posted on March 24, 2023March 24, 2023 by Caity Kerr

I finished up texturing the customer NPC’s, giving them 2D facial features like eyes, moles, scars, freckles. I fixed all of my FBX files for facial features to match the new positioning of the character model, which needed to be adjusted for rigging. I ensured that all of my textures worked with the various 3D model features that have been made.

The other prop modellers in the team also drew up an additional prop list, as we had room and time to add more. I spent the evening modelling the additional props I volunteered for:

Police Car
Tree
Spray Bottle/Bleach bottle
Sign Post

I started by looking at references on sketch fab, for inspo on low poly assets but also looking at the topology itself for an idea of how my topology should look:

mercedes benz 190E by panomayu on Sketchfab

Police Car by panomayu on Sketchfab

POLICE CAR – LOW POLY by Jasmin Daniel on Sketchfab

Low-Poly Police Car by JD24 on Sketchfab

Reference

I carried on with modelling my props:

I brought the assets into UE5, again, to check that they work — I’m happy with how the models turned out. I did quite a bit of research on Sketchfab before I started, and I believe it helped my understanding of the construction in topology, particularly with the trees and the police car.

My list work whilst sorting NPC and additional assets (Bonus Doodles):